Author: Daniel Lieberman

“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren’t there.”

—George Santayana, Spanish philosopher, born December 16, 1863

William Lyon Mackenzie King’s crack (what a great name!) about his country is oddly appropriate for this week when Canada announced plans to claim the North Pole as its territory. Because of climate change (in case you haven’t heard, the ice is melting fast up north), the Arctic is a geopolitical timebomb. Petroleum and other mineral resources attract attention from strategists in every country with claims to territory in the Arctic. New sealanes are opening: ice free Northwest and Northeast Passages will be a reality in a few more years. Canada has joined Russia, which planted a flag on the seabed 14,000 feet under the Pole in 2007, in asserting expansive new claims to sovereignty in the Arctic.

I did not know that Mackenzie King, the longest serving Prime Minister in Canadian history was a convinced Spiritualist who shared a deep love for Richard Wagner’s operas with Adolf Hitler. King believed that Hitler was a great man like Wagner’s heroes, who embody the struggle between good and evil, and would reject the dark side and redeem the German people. King always explicitly rejected the anti-Semitism and brutality of Nazi Germany, and strongly supported the Allies once the war started.

When did people start saying “frickin‘“ for ”friggin’”? And why did they change? There’s the alternative “freakin’” that you hear from time to time also. I’m a foul-mouthed baby boomer and tend to cut to the chase. More about words that we erroneously think are offensive novelties in 16 Words That Are Much Older Than They Seem.

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

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Dude, D’ya Have to Use So Many Cuss Words?

“No frigging way! Frigging has been around since the late 1500s, though it originally referred to masturbation and would not have made your sentence sound any more polite than it would have with that other word that frigging usually replaces. Since the beginning of the 1900s it has served as the more family-friendly substitute for that other word. In this 1943 quote, it can be seen in action alongside a few other ingenious substitute words: ‘This shunting frigging new arrangement…has got every flaming thing foxed up.’”

16 Words That Are Much Older Than They Seem

The Last Word

“If some countries have too much history, we have too much geography.”

—Mackenzie King, Canadian statesman, born December 17, 1874

“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”

—Jane Austen, British writer, born December 16, 1775

Jane Austen and John Selden remind us to take the world as it is, not as we would like it to be. People can be reliably assumed to not be angels; governments and businesses can be expected to be chaotic and to demand improvisation and adaptability. The trick is to “juggle” realism, charity, and humor.

I was confounded by encountering a young Russian woman at Valley Venture Mentors last Wednesday who was smiling. I asked her what kind of Russian goes around smiling, which made her smile even more, and explain that she’s probably been out of Kirghizstan too long to be properly in control of her face. I linked a few weeks ago to Why Russians Are Not Smiling, which does a great job explaining the cultural reasons for Russians’ solemn demeanor. Go visit the young woman’s husband’s jazz website if you would like something to make you smile this morning.

Other cultures besides Eastern European ones have rules about smiling different from ours, too. Here’s a piece from reformed non-smiling Englishman Geoff Dyer that resonated with me: “Not smiling seemed a sign of high seriousness, the badge of the intellectual and reader of Adorno.” Ah, youth: we’re better off smiling. (By the way, the smiling Englishman was a great favorite of my mother’s, Terry-Thomas, often found leering in comedies in the fifties and sixties. Maybe guys like him convinced people that they were better off not smiling at all.) 

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

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Should Englishmen Smile?

“I remember very distinctly my parents insisting on the importance of being honest, of never telling lies, of always being dependable. What I don’t recall is their instilling in me the importance of a nice smile. Maybe they did and I just forgot, but that seems unlikely since although I turned out to be the soul of honesty and reliability, I ended up greeting the world with the face of an undertaker arriving – precisely on time – at the home of the bereaved. So was this, in order of specificity: just a familial oversight? A generational thing – I mean, are kids now taught to smile in the way that we learned our multiplication tables? Or is a paucity of smiles a persistent feature of British life?”

The Last Word

“The world cannot be governed without juggling.”

—John Selden, English statesman, born December 16, 1584

“Democracy is not about making speeches. It is about making committees work.”

—Alan Bullock, British historian, born December 13, 1914

Having spent much of the last four or five years working on committees, I can assure you that a good deal of speechmaking gets done. I sometimes wonder if the symbolic point of the chairperson’s gavel is to remind committee members that the chair can make herself thoroughly unpleasant if necessary, and has the weaponry at hand.

Now I know why a mild-mannered, benevolent person such as myself is so often forced to get snarky. I knew there must be a reason other than having been raised by wolves in New Jersey.

I knew that you can fold a one dollar bill so that George Washington morphs into a mushroom or mushroom cloud, and the close resemblance of Benjamin Franklin on the hundred to Jack Benny has often been noted, but I never knew how to turn Abraham Lincoln on the five into Bill Murray until Merlin Mann explained it.

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

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“Smarm, on the other hand, is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says ”Don’t Be Evil,” rather than making sure it does not do evil….The idea of success, or of successfulness, hangs over the whole subject of smarm. It is not true, after all, that the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of the market….Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.

“The practice of cynicism is smarm.”

On Smarm

The Last Word

“If you keep making jokes like that, somebody is going to shoot you, father.”

—Mary Todd Lincoln, American first lady, born December 13, 1818

“Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.”

—Hector Berlioz, French composer, born December 11, 1803

What should InCommN do about Don’t Eat Lunch Alone? We schedule it twice a month in Easthampton, Greenfield, and Northampton. We get pretty thin turnouts. Maybe the DELA idea has gotten stale and we need to try something else. Any suggestions for what you would like to see (if anything) would be welcome. All of us are pretty busy and it’s often not possible for any of us to show up to host the various lunches. We don’t like doing that.

Continue reading “What Should InCommN Do About Don’t Eat Lunch Alone?”

“Each new generation is a fresh invasion of savages.”

—Hervey Allen, American author, born December 8, 1889

The best part of the piece about the likelihood of birds attacking Amazon’s Delivery Drones are the videos of raptors doing a job on various radio controlled aircraft. Watch the skies! 

Are you Looking for Affordable Office Space? Click Workspace — a coworking space in Northampton — has a special offer for InCommN subscribers to try out coworking for free. Learn more and get your free pass.

I announced yesterday that the official policy of the InCommN Almanac is that we live in a post-scarcity economy. In Abundance, economic problems resolve to problems of distribution. Some of them get fixed by technology and economic development: that has been the great achievement of capitalism over the last couple of hundred years. It has made many people all over the world rich beyond the dreams of any older society.

Where apparently irrational misallocations and bottlenecks occur always ask: Who benefits? There is always somebody who is disproportionately advantaged by bad distibution. The trick is going to be to convince all the players that in Abundance they don’t need to be so greedy. Economies are not zero-sum games and don’t benefit from the players perceiving them as such. That we seem to be incapable of learning this lesson as a society is a source of puzzlement. Henry Ford figured it out in 1910 for chrissake!

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

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Note to Jeff Bezos: The Birds Is Coming

“Birds are going to hate these drones…[B]irds will be chasing them. Unseen to us, the skies are checkered with fiercely defended bird territories. Open-country raptors—hawks, eagles, kites, harriers, etc.—don’t take kindly to interlopers on their hunting grounds, and frequently chase, dive-bomb, and take talons to intruders. The confrontations can be even more violent during nesting season when vulnerable chicks are potential prey.”

Amazon delivery drone problems: Birds will attack.

The Last Word

“I never smile unless I mean it.”

—Donny Osmond, American musician, born December 9, 1957

“I handed my passport to the immigration officer, and he looked at it and looked at me and said, ‘What are you?’”

—Grace Hopper, American scientist, born December 9, 1906

Grace Hopper pioneered high level computer languages, leading to the development of COBOL in the early 1960s. She is the only computer programmer that I know of to have a navy destroyer named after her.

Continue reading “What’s a “computer programmer,” Commodore?”

“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.”

—Walt Disney, American cartoonist, born December 5, 1901

As well he might. Mickey was very good to Walt Disney.

Disney the corporation is perhaps the greatest example of what I call “cultural cancer.” I mean the endless mixing and mutation of literary and visual arts so that the end product is an undifferentiated, timeless mass of “entertainment,” without any possibility of making fine cultural distinctions or understanding the history of ideas. Please do not get me started on the strange effect any approach to the end of the Mickey Mouse copyright has on the United States Congress.

Continue reading “Mickey Mouse and the Jade Rabbit”

“I am responsible only to God and history.” —Francisco Franco, Spanish leader, born December 4, 1892

Fear men like Francisco Franco who are on intimate terms with God and history.

We graduated from the Lean Launchpad Pioneer Valley Fall 2013 at Click Workspace last night. We learned a lot and had a great time during the last twelve weeks. Congratulations to Andy Wollner of uChampion, Dan Nelson of Food on a Truck and Randall Smith of receive.ly. We look forward to hearing more about their fantastic startups.

Many thanks to Paul Silva for getting this up and running, and to Rick Feldman, Jim Mumm, Thom Fox, Joe Gensheimer, and everyone else who helped out. There will be a new session of the Lean Launchpad Pioneer Valley starting in February 2014. Get more info and sign up for the course; you won’t regret it.

We’ve found it pretty hard to actually sell stuff with Facebook Ads. The sweet spot we’ve found is to use FB Ads to attract people to an active, fun Fan Page that appeals to their interests. A Fan Page Like is a pretty direct channel to communicate with actual or potential customers, with lots of opportunity to bring them back to the brand’s website. Here’s a case study of the most successful FB ad campaign we’ve ever run. Crazy Orchid Lady Facebook Campaign

And indeed, as John Phillip Sousa worries in this somewhat overwrought piece about the threat to American civilization of then-new (1906) technologies of recorded music, what of the national chest?

Today and Tomorrow in #westernma

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“Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?”

“Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time….

“It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure….

“When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?”

John Philip Sousa, “The Menace of Mechanical Music,” 1906

The Last Word

“A lawyer’s dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.”

—Samuel Butler, British poet, born December 4, 1835